It is strange, but somehow I have no such distinct recollection of our home as I have of the other objects that were familiar to my childish mind. I can see the little muddy brook that ran just back of the garden fence. Down the hill on the edge of the stream stood a log cheese-house,—at least, it seems so now,—and back of this cheese-house beside the brook must have been a favorite spot for me to wade and fish, although I have no remembrance that I ever caught anything, which fact I am happy to record. Beyond the stream was an orchard. I am uncertain whether or not it belonged to my father, although I rather think it must have been owned by somebody else, the apples always looked so tempting and so red,—which reminds me that all through life it has seemed to me that no fruit was quite so sweet as that which was just beyond my reach. Anyhow, this orchard stands out very plainly in my mind. It was a very large orchard,—in fact, a great forest of trees; and I remember that I always stole over the fence intending to get the apples on the nearest tree, but they did not taste so sweet nor look so red as some others farther on, which in turn were passed by for others yet a little farther off, until I had gone quite through the orchard in my endeavor to get the very best. Although I have been grown up for many a year, somehow this habit of seeing something better further on has clung to me through life. So tenacious is this habit, that I fancy I have missed much that is valuable and good in my eager haste to get something better still. I am not quite certain about the orchard, perhaps it was not so very large after all; at least, when I went back a few years ago there was no cheese-house, and no orchard, and even the brook was grown up to grass and weeds. I know that in my childhood my parents moved from the old house to another slightly better, and nearer town; but though I can clearly remember certain incidents of both, still I have no recollection of our moving, and it is utterly impossible to keep the impressions of each separate and distinct.
My first memory of a schoolhouse seems quite clear. It may be that the things I remember never really happened, although the impression of them is very strong upon my mind. I must have been very young, hardly more than three or four years old, and was doubtless taken to school by an elder brother or sister; certainly I was too young to be a pupil. The schoolhouse was a long way from home,—miles and miles it seemed to me. After being in school for hours, I must have grown weary and restless, sitting so motionless and still, for I know that I was boxed on the ears either by the teacher’s hand or with a slate. I ran out of the room sobbing and crying, and went down the long white road to my home. I shall never forget that journey in the heat and dust. It must have been the greatest pain and sorrow I had ever known. Doubtless it was the humiliation of being boxed on the ears before the whole school that broke my heart; at least, I felt as if I never would reach home, and I must have sprinkled every foot of the way with my bitter tears. I remember that teacher’s name to-day, and I never forgave her, until a short time ago, after I read Tolstoi. Now I only realize how stupid and ignorant she was to awaken such hatred in the heart of a little child. In those days whipping was a part, and a very large part, of the regular course of the district school, and I learned in a few years not to mind it very much,—in fact, rather to enjoy it, for it gave me such good standing with the other children of the school.
How full of illusions and delusions we children were! Since I have grown to man’s estate, I have travelled the same road over which I sobbed in that far-off day, and it was really but a very little way,—a short half-mile,—and still, as I look back to that little crying child, it seems as if he must have walked across a desert beneath a tropical sun, and borne all the despair and anguish of the world inside his little jacket.
Another memory that has become a part of my being grows out of the great Civil War. I was probably four or five years old, and was playing under the big maple-trees in our old front yard. The scene all comes back to me as I write. I have a stick or hoop, or perhaps both, in my little hand. No one else is anywhere about. I hear a drum and fife coming over the hill, and I run to the fence and look down the gravelly road. A two-horse wagon loaded with men and boys, whose names and perhaps faces I seem to know, drives past me as I peer through the palings of the fence. They are dressed in uniform, and are proud and gay. In the centre of the wagon is one boy standing up; I see his face plainly, and catch its boyish smile. They drive past the house to the railroad station, on their way to the Southern battle-fields. I must have been told a great deal about these men and about the war, for my people were abolitionists, who looked upon the rebels as some sort of monsters, and had no thought that there could be any side but ours. However, I now remember nothing at all of what was said to me, but I hear the martial music, I see the horses and wagons and men, and clear and distinct from all the rest is this one boy’s face that I knew so well. Even more distinctly do I remember a day some months later. I must then have begun going to the district school, for I remember that there was no school that day. I recall a great throng of people, and among them all the boys and girls from school, and we are gathered inside the burying-ground where they are carrying the young soldier who rode past our house a few months before. I cannot remember what was said at the funeral, but this is the first impression that I can recall of the grim spectre Death. What it meant to my childish mind I cannot now conceive. I remember only the hushed awe and the deep dread that fell upon us all when we realized that they were putting this boy into the ground and that we should never see his face again. Whatever the feeling, I fancy that time and years have not changed or modified it, or made it any easier to reconcile or understand.
But with the memory of the funeral there lingers an impression that we all thought this young man a glorious, brave, and noble boy, and that his widowed mother and brothers and sisters ought to have felt happy and proud that he was buried in the ground. I remembered the mother for many years, and how she always mourned her son; but it was a long, long time before I came to understand that the fact that the boy was killed upon the field of battle really did not make the sorrow any less for the family left behind. And it was still longer before I came to realize that it is no more noble or honorable to die fighting on the field of battle than in any other way.
CHAPTER III
MY HOME
My earliest recollections that I can feel quite sure are real are about my family and home. My father was a miller, and had a little grist-mill by the side of the creek, just in the shade of some large oak-trees. His mill must have been very small, for I always knew that he was poor. Still, it seemed to me that the mill was a wonderful affair, almost as large as the big white church that stood upon the hill. It was run by water when the creek was not too low, which I am sure was very often, as I think it over now. Above the mill was a great dam, which made an enormous pond, larger than the Atlantic Ocean, and much more dangerous to any of us boys venturesome enough to go out upon it in a boat, or even on skates in the winter time. But the most marvellous part of all was the wonderful water-wheel hidden almost underneath the mill. It seemed as if there were a great hollow in the ground, to make room for the wheel; and if I had any opinion on the subject, I must have thought that the wheel grew there, for surely no one could make a monster like that. Often I used to go with my father up to the head of the mill-race, when he lifted the big wooden gate and let the waters come down out of the dam through the race and the wooden flume over the great groaning wheel. I well remember how I used to stand in awe and wonder while my father opened the gate, and then run down the path ahead of the rushing tide and peep through a hole to see the old wheel start. Then I would scamper over the mill, from the cellar with its cogs and pulleys, up to the garret with its white dusty chutes and its incomprehensible machines. Then I played around the great sacks and enormous bins of wheat and corn, and watched the grain as it streamed into the hopper ready to be ground to pieces by the slowly turning stones.
How real, and still how unreal, all this seems to-day! Is it all a dream? and am I writing a fairy-story like “Little Red Riding Hood” or “The Three Black Bears”? Surely all these events are as clear and vivid as the theatre party of last week. But while I so plainly see the little, idle, prattling child, looking with wondering eyes at the great turning wheel, and asking his simple questions of the grave, kind old man in the great white coat, somehow there is no relation between that simple child and the man whom the world has buffeted and tossed for so many years, and with such a rough unfriendly hand, that he cannot help the feeling that this far-off child was really someone else.
My father was a just and upright man,—I can see him now dipping his bent wooden measure into the hopper of grain and taking out his toll, never a single kernel more than was his due. No doubt the suspicious farmers who brought their sacks of wheat and corn often thought that he dipped out more grain than he had a right to take; and even many of those who knew that he did not, still thought he was a fool because he failed to make the most of the opportunities he had. As I grew up, I learned that there are all sorts of people in the world, and that selfishness and greed and envy are, to say the least, very common in the human heart; but I never could be thankful enough that my father was honest and simple, and that his love of truth and justice had grown into his being as naturally as the oaks were rooted to the earth along the little stream.
The old wheel ceased turning long ago. The last stick of timber in its wondrous mechanism has rotted and decayed; the old mill itself has vanished from the earth. The drying stream and the great mills of the new Northwest long since conspired to destroy my father’s simple trade. Even the dam has been washed away, and a tiny thread of water now trickles down over the hill where the rushing flood fell full upon the great turning wheel. Last summer I went back to linger, like a ghost, around the old familiar spot; and I found that even the great unexplored pond had dried up, and a field of corn was growing peacefully upon the soil that once upheld this treacherous sea. And the old miller too, with his kindly, simple, honest face,—the old miller with his great white coat,—he too is gone, gone as completely as his father and all the other fathers and grandfathers who have come and gone; the dear, kind old miller, who listened to my childish questions, and taught me, or rather tried to teach me, what was right and wrong, has grown weary and lain down to rest, and will soon be quite forgotten by the world,—unless this story shall bring his son so much fame that some of the glory shall be reflected back to him.